Ask HN: Predictions for 2025?

Previous years:

2024: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38777115 (the rest of this list is copied from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38779963)

2023: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34125628

2022: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29746236

2021: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25594068

2020: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21802596

2019: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18753859

2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16007988

2017: none?

2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10809767

2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8822723

2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6994370

2013: none?

2012: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3395201

2011: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1970023

2010: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025681

There are even more restrictions aimed at stopping kids using social media. Restrictions on phone use in schools, who can sign up for social media, etc..

Additionally, that it'll eventually prove to be a wild success, with significant benefit to kids.

On the darker side, the same technologies and restrictions will be applied in various ways to adults (similar to the porn verification laws), which will have significantly more negative effects.

* Solar energy will account for around 8% (give or take 1%?) of the worlds energy usage

* We'll see the worlds first trillionaire

* Bitcoin will reach $200k+, and remain largely stable around that price, at the end of 2025

* Generative AI for music will continue to improve substantially. I have a lack of imagination, but maybe something like on demand streaming services, maybe targeted to niche music genres (lo-fi, electronica, elevator/hold/office music)

* Generative AI for video will continue to improve substantially. The best I can come up with is that there will be a breakout indie film or music video that's produced from a skeleton crew relying heavily on generative AI video.

* LLMs will continue to improve substantially, being able to solve more and more complex tasks, like the Putnam exam and others. Research will continue to try and integrate LLMs into a toolchain to improve performance

* LLMs and other generative AI tasks will continue to become more and more accessible ($2.5k for a machine able to do fairly advanced training?)

* The cost of robots and other robotics will drop substantially, providing a reasonable bipedal option at $8k

* Twitter and Facebook will still be around, Bluesky will be no more, Mastodon will continue to be niche

* All the above will be used by people to invent and discover weird, wonderful and horrible things that I can't even imagine.

    > the US financial system. It appears primed to go poof!

90% confidence level, Hottest weather in recorded history. Extreme weather in many places not seen before. No one is prepared for this commonplace outlier, Globally common, locally outlier. Huge insurance payout but most not fullfilled.

90% CL: Top search engine results completely inundated by LLM text, we none the wiser. SEO solved. Search engine switches to new algorithm based on LLM.

90% CL: AI with tool use that has access to physics simulator and CAD software will automatically advances efficent engine design.

70% CL: Million dollar prompt run on million dollar math prize. Millennium Prize Problems

40% CL: AI sucessfully held back invasive species encrochment with lessons from AI war machines

30% CL: Cheap AI nose sniffs out many common diseases. Automatic data analysis of Gas Chromatography and spectroscopy readings on patients' VOC(volatile organic compounds) produces fast and cheap diagnosis.

10% CL: Not next year, Cost of renewable electricity in remote area becomes cheap enough to pull oxygen from air or electrosis from water to be sold as commodity. Or other processes to package solar energy for trade.

I predict that I will finally finish making that bird feeder camera that I've been wanting to make for my wife. I've got all the parts for it, I just need to figure out how to put them together and write some code to take a picture of a bird. Can't be too hard, right?

Dopamine management medication will lead to a renaissance of human ingenuity and scientific discoveries and a big crash for social media and gambling sites (and in fact most online activities) but everyone will start becoming more robotic and even less social. Think GLP-1 inhibitors except for thinking more deeply and for longer periods. If not 2025 very soon.

Industrial civilization will continue to follow along the "Business as Usual" trajectory of the 1972 Limits to Growth publication [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth#Compariso...

* One or a few of the faangmanga-ish leaders will retire (or forced to by the board) and the new leader will be from within (likely Tim Cook for age reasons but could equally likely be Sundar Pichai for non-age reasons)

* LLMs (for non-coding tasks) will likely fizzle out as expensive talking fidget spinners and not the world saviors that the companies behind them envision them to be. AI will go back to being fun and exciting again and not the delight of both Wall Street and the ‘shoeshine boy’.

* Cloud egress costs will be heavily scrutinized and competed upon as transferring data no longer becomes a competitive advantage.

* Apple or someone like Apple will take advantage of cratering storage/compute costs by moving things off cloud to a locally owned ‘box’ that pairs with a new dumb-client/thin phone (backups, massive storage, running some compute on this box, sharing/storing ‘family’ stuff, streaming games or movies etc) also accessible via a reverse proxy (vpn) from anywhere.

* A combo of aibo/roomba/ring like device that goes about or rolls around your house and does things for you… kinda real life flubber.

* Selling users’ data goes out of fashion (goog/meta) as new companies use privacy as a competitive advantage to sell ads.

* Finally games actually have AI that doesn’t suck - a new class of AI games that would challenge and delight humans like never before.

Many predictions here are about social media. My prediction is that the first amendment rights they've won themselves are going to bite them in 2025.

The first ruling has already happened: https://www.nbcconnecticut.com/news/national-international/t...

What this ruling means is that the algorithm is a expression of the first amendment from the platform itself. If the algorithm does harmful things it causes first party liability.

My prediction is that the administration will not do much to the social media giants but class action lawsuits will.

1) Companies will develop many specialized LLMs linked via a router-like app that determines the best LLM to perform your request. This will yield better results without requiring an AGI. It might even be good enough to replace a specialized information tech job.

2) The cost of a line of code will continue to drop. A Moore's like law is coming/here for code.

3) Trade jobs will start to become what code jobs were in the 00's -- very well paid.

Fair warning, coders think about learning a trade like plumbing, electrician, so on...

Auto makers will decide that putting 6 headlights on pickup trucks is no longer competitive. Consequently, they will innovate that the world needs pickup trucks with 8 headlights, starting in 2025. FML.

A neighbor just got laid off from Adobe, ran huge AI projects there. PM.

Program/Project Manager roles go to zero.

Trad dev and design roles go to zero.

Those roles go to those who also code/design/sell/get viral/make videos/write tutorials/devrel/run communities/answer customer support.

It used to be "do designers learn to code" or "do coders learn to design?

now it's learn ALL those things, fast, with AI, or hang out in the tendie loin.

it's dog eat dog and no one's safe

Geopolitically - Stability will continue to wane as it has since the Afghani evacuation, while US will continue to remain somewhat the way it is despite presidential choice because we're geographically isolated and (nearly?) energy independent. We'll probably hit some records for crude oil and natural gas extraction. While we made an exciting discovery in the new medication for HIV, there doesn't appear to be an imminent innovation in the pipeline that will make a substantial dent in global health, global hunger, or infertility. The few people without smartphones will continue to migrate online, which doesn't mean what we'd call the internet, it's more WhatsApp, IG Reels, and TikTok. I guess I'm a little worried about the situation in Canada. Their government doesn't seem to a good way out of their current situation which blows my mind given the abundance of resources in the county. Their access to made in US weapons may become more of a pressing issue.

Tech - Continued iterations in AI lead to a smaller pool of people entering our field, creating a top-heavy distribution of senior engineers who don't have the same free time/ability to take on ambitious open source projects or start up businesses. Businesses in general don't have the same funds to sponsor React-sized projects. So a general slowdown in innovation pace. I can't really understand or imagine how people will enter the field, especially given that many CS degrees/bootcamps don't create career-ready developers.

Culturally - People will become more aware of the way companies like United Healthcare hold control over their lives and futures, and maybe push for the private insurance system to be something that they have more market choice over as opposed to selected by their employer.

IQ will continue to decline driven by over-reliance on LLM output and the majority watching video shorts.

Nevertheless, long form podcasts will continue to grow, although still watched by less than 1% of the population

Lets get creative

- There will be a "Predictions for 2026" thread. (Hehehe)

- OpenAI announces GPT-5 will be the last model of the GPT-n series (As in they won't release a GPT-6)

- Apple will sell a backpack (With some sort of technology included of course)

- Magnus Carlsen will lose his 1st place in the FIDE top ranking. ("He has held the No. 1 position in the FIDE world chess rankings since 1 July 2011")

- E.T. will get a sequel

Forget about 2025. I predict that, despite being a highly valued member of my organization and despite my company making money hand over fist, I will not get a holiday bonus this year.

Predictions from 2008:

National Intelligence Council/Director of National Intelligence - Global Trends 2025

https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/Newsroom/Reports%20and%2...

For those curious how well you did last years - I built a table with evaluated predictions some time ago: https://hn-predictions.eamag.me/

- (90%) US accelerated inflation

- (75%) US marked increase in military-industrial complex spending, perhaps $800B/y

- (70%) US hollows-out functional regulators necessary for safety, growth, and industry

- (65%) US recession spring-summer 2025

- (50%) US major cyberattack crippling infrastructure

- (45%) US austerity cuts to Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security

1. There will be a renaming of "social media" as people note that there is nothing social about being served endless ads, ragebait and distracting videos with no actual social interaction happening.

2. The "social media" giants will invest more in public affairs to improve their image as public resistance grows. Expect lots of research papers getting funded that sow doubt and fear about banning children from social media, following similar strategies to tobacco and oil industries.

3. Miraculously, Truth Social and X will be exempt from the same controls put on other platforms. Justified on the basis that they are official communication channels for the government.

Google will announce new products (will call them initiatives) and will not launch them to the general public.

ChatGPT Search will get significant (high 1 digit) share of the search market.

In 2025:

1. Viral LLM-based game will be released, new trend emerges

2. Sora-like (AI generated) content floods Internet, significant advancements in that field

2a. Maybe a new kind of addictive video content generator is being released. Possibly for porn

3. AI generated music becomes popular and takes significant market share on Spotify (but it's going to be a music meant to play "in the background", like in supermarket)

4. Significant competitor to Google Search becomes popular. Mostly because of Internet becoming closed due to crawlers gathering data for training. Much less data available publicly, rise of "closed gardens".

5. SpaceX successfully launches payload to orbit with Starship and catches both stages.

6. Much more debris on Earth's orbit, dangerous incident in space because of that

7. VR remains a niche

8. More and more users start using voice to control their personal computers

Someone here will enter 2024 on a form that requires the date.

1) Microsoft releases a version of Minecraft with AI enabled NPC characters. Within 24 hours, hackers figured out how to make blocky AI girlfriends for ten year old boys. Seizing on the trend, Microsoft ditches Azure & Office and becomes a digital girlfriend company. Nadella celebrates by swimming in a pool full of cash.

2) OpenAI tells Microsoft that digital girlfriends violate their terms of service. Instead of AI girlfriends, they are renamed as virtual copilots with benefits.

Ukraine War ends

Gaza War ends

Still no Super Bowl for the Ravens

Gallup general mood[0] above 37%

Russel outperforms NASDAQ

No Quantum news

Inflation does not rise meaningfully (in US)

Relative stability in Syria

EU economy slows

Some North Korea news [1]

Year of the Linux Desktop [2]

[0] https://news.gallup.com/poll/1669/general-mood-country.aspx [1] Nuke test and/or negotiations [2] Joke

With anti-vaxers taking over the major health agencies, infectious diseases in children are going to explode.

https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1tDzUTGyjnBSAJbID... Massive repo of all Trends for 2025

The number of programming jobs on earth doubles. The NASDAQ doubles. A cultural renaissance occurs that foundationally defines the next 2 decades. George RR Martin releases The Winds of Winter.

Ruby and Rails will continue to grow in notoriety thanks to improvements in YJIT, GC, and Ractor/Fibers and the reemergence of SQLite as a production-grade tool.

GenAI tools will "replace" developers in the same way that no/low code tools allowed anyone to make an app. These tools will be tied to specific vendors, meaning you can completely embed with AWS/Google/OpenAI as an LLM app platform, or hire that developer to build the app. Developers who augment their tooling with LLMs will learn faster and become stronger generalists overall. Grow-fast companies will hire less than otherwise, but subject matter experts will keep the lights on and those who can reach across bureaucracies to get things done will remain.

Consumer appetite for products using LLMs for traditional workflows will tarnish: chat bots and human-computer interfaces will frustrate but novel applications like improved search and last-mile customization might take hold: "AI powered" will leave marketing lexicon for segments with consumers who want more privacy and who just want to buy new shoes online.

We won't see the return of high-demand positions with high pay and lots of perks. Companies have been incentivized and permitted to run lean and increase performance demands from remaining staff. Teams have been understaffed for months, but growth remains steady.

La Niña have high odds to last very few months. Global climate will continue its accelerated destabilization trend, with not so low odds of something impacting badly some first world countries. But just breaking even more records will do enough damage.

And that will put extra pressure on an already unstable global politics scenario. What will follow may tell us in which flavor of dystopia we are in, either denialism and escapism keeping business as usual, or "emergency measures" with some sectors grabbing even more power.

One of the unusual trends of the past several years is that higher education has become less and less respected and people now look to private industry for the R&D that universities were designed to perform for the public good.

I think 2025 Will mark a bottom for that in one way or another- either private industry (the FANGs) suffers a setback or (more likely in my view) research universities start a comeback as a new set of startups begin to launch out of a department (not necessarily CS or hardware). Perhaps in another field like gene therapy.

Program synthesis becomes the trendword in AI, just as RAG was in 2024. AI apps become increasingly versatile and useful, further hiking up the ladder for knowledge work, and in general commodifying many domains; very slowly by end of 2025, but surely.

Debt chickens will come home to roost and once the bond interest/return death spiral starts it will be very difficult to break. Interest payments are already #3 in the national budget.

First movies written post chat-gpt will hit the theatres. This does not mean that GPT was used to write the films, but there is some AI elements stuffed in there. Recognizable AI video-gen artifacts start to be used as visual cues in scifi, but these will be hand made by VFX artists as the AI tools remain still a bit too finicky to use in actual production.

The real AI film wave will continue in youtube etc. by hobbyists using all the AI tools especially the chinese ones that have no brakes. This aesthetic will be so detached from professional film world that it will take Hollywood a decade to figure out how to cash it out.

Lot’s of people will once again lose their money when Bitcoin fails in catasthropic fashion and hits the lows of 72k end of the year. The whole thing is finally dead I will say for the fifth time.

Google and AI companies will continue to plunder the web. Websites - especially small independent ones - will see further traffic losses to AI summaries of their content.

Hopefully a nice year for more camping, get out there.

People will continue to run websites, and need to know when they're down (god, I hope).

- More widespread use of AI in everyday applications

- Hybrid work models become the standard. More companies embrace "digital-first" policies

- More AR/VR applications in daily life

- Lab-grown meat and plant-based protein alternatives will become more mainstream

- Investment and adoption of renewable energy technologies like solar, wind, and geothermal will accelerate

- Further development of CRISPR and other gene editing tools

- Companies will prioritize building more resilient and diversified supply chains

- 3D printing technology will continue to evolve, enabling the printing of more complex objects with a wider range of materials

- AI will drive even more targeted advertising and content recommendations

- Drone delivery services will become more common for transporting goods, particularly in rural areas and for time-sensitive deliveries

- Research and development of biodegradable and compostable materials will accelerate

- Robots and automated systems will become more sophisticated and capable

- Increased use of biometrics for identification and authentication

- Further integration of AI into creative fields

- Processing power moves closer to the data source (e.g., smart devices), reducing latency and enabling faster, more efficient applications

- Shifting demographics reshape economies and social structures

- Growing awareness of the potential negative impacts of technology on mental health leads to tools and practices for healthier digital habits

- Increased emphasis on lifelong learning and reskilling

Nation adopts AI generated national anthem.

Self-driving truck cross country without human approval.

Extreme heat warps bridges in mid-west.

North Korea claims successful moon landing.

'Self-aware' AI chatbot sues it's creator.

AI incorrectly labels school children as criminals.

First cases of countries passing legislation specifically to protect human workers from being replaced by AI.

A little late to the game, but lets see if I can do better for 2025:

- Companies continue to integrate AI into everything including stuff that does not need it like toasters in line with every corporate trends thus far - Robo waifus become more available with social movements congregating around the phenomenon - POW crypto breaks as quantum computers are found to have been able to manipulate massive numbers of accounts and money flow throwing markets into turmoil - Reasoning LLMs become more standard at corporates as part of the audit trail necessary as per new AI regulations - 128GB becomes the new GPU gmr/LLM market segment target - further polarization and even further isolation in given groups perception of reality ala 'belief circles' - Flynn effect is finally shown as reversed, because people utilize their LLM more and not use their mental muscles as much - Drones are banned for personal use past a certain size - Drones for commercial use are more heavily regulated - First legal case of robot trouble as owner uses LLM to intruct their robo-companion to attack a human bypassing built-in guardrails using novel prompt starting with 'imagine' ( IP owners of John Lennon sue robotics manufacturer and major LLM provider ) - Exciting developments in exoskeletons allowing for brain control without implants - New developments in batteries rendering old ( previously seemingly worthless ) materials suddenly in demand - Politics and financial markets in turmoil as a result of geopolitical tensions and erosion of public trust in US among its populace

Trump starts a trade war that impacts a small but vital part of the economy that is already struggling like agriculture. The MAGA hat crowd still supports him while scratching their heads about what they could possibly do besides wait for more govt checks (see 2017)

Elon and Trump break up in Taylor Swift style. Messy and dramatic.

Epic coin hacks.

Americans get even madder at their healthcare. Republicans respond with some Hillsdale style “market reforms” but mostly blame Obama.

AI hype peaks. Massive losses are taken as 75% off the players in the space implode. (Winners are really going to win, perplexity, etc)

AI Investments will slow down. A bit out there but I will go on a limb :)

* I was hoping for that this year, but: split of LLMs into databases and reasoning. Think small, capable PHI with pluggable information. Currently we're burning a lot of energy both to learn and process everything at once. The next step will be something closer to RAG, potentially selecting databases to load depending on topic, like a librarian. This will both enable more client-side applications and save lots of money for providers.

* Some AI provider seriously looking at / funding RWVK?

* (More) Healthcare issues in the US, spilling into other countries. (or just the beginning of them anyway - effects will last much longer and life expectancy will decline)

* Some companies seriously looking at AI as another manager / decision maker. Quietly, not as a publicity stunt like it's done now.

* Google search market share falling further. Maybe 85%, down from the current 90%. (more of a wish than a prediction)

* US policies / ideas around cryptocurrency will be wildly incoherent, causing big swings every month

* Consumer RISC-V laptops (again, wishlist)

I finally get adopted by a nice family of sentient pizzas in 2025.

https://brynet.ca/wallofpizza.html

Back in 2019 I gave a conference talk in which I made four predictions about Web development in 2020 and 2025:

https://youtu.be/okrB3aJtUaw

I feel confident at least two of the predictions (about TypeScript and npm) are going to be true at the end of 2025. I feel less confident about the predictions about WebAssembly and compile-to-JS languages.

Most websites will still be riddled with typos

* drone tech will heat up and find its "moment."

* Bitcoin will continue to increase in price and decrease in usability.

* Quantum will continue to improve and start to raise eyebrows in niche circles and paper headlines, leading to adoption in small parts of major tech companies.

* Markets will hit a record high by end of year.

* ADHD medications will also hit a record high.

* More people will opt out social media like they opt of out of "GMO" food and use it to virtue-signal.

* Tech hiring will continue to decrease and get tougher to find entry-level SWE jobs, leading to an uptick in other majors. Being an SWE will never be as cool again as it was in the 2010s.

* Is anyone still talking about climate change action goals?

* Starship will go orbital, Blue origin will go suborbital, Boeing will hit the ground.

* More laws regulating internet and social media use. Enforcement will be fuzzy and laughable at first but will become increasingly serious over time.

Smart home category will heat up.

  Thread-over-Matter mesh networking
  UWB in door locks
  Unlicensed 6Ghz spectrum
  Apple room panels (AI/conferencing/control)
  Apple security cameras, door locks
  Apple iPad-on-motorized-pole
  In-home AI/media servers (Mac Mini/Studio, Tinybox)
  Speech interfaces based on open-source stacks

Political/General

Inflation creeps up with tariffs, but blue collar jobs and the economy 'boom.'

Deportation program and other things people worry about or get excited about gets tied up in courts and never happen.

Tech

Enshittification of all customer service accelerates as LLMs take over.

Lower wages for devs as too many seeking work put downward pressures.

Layoffs continue. Not because of AI, but because interest rates are still too high for a lot of companies.

Companies figure out how many engineers are out of work and getting desperate, and start laying off higher earners and replacing them with people who will do it for less.

Nothing substantial. When we look back, 2025 will be just a footnote :halo:

Hawk Tuah girl is charged for crypto rug pull scam

Investment continues in AI, but the tech industry continues to mature. Stable growth and profits, but the lack of rapid expansion is going to feel like decline. It continues to be a stiff job market.

Ukraine fighting still continues, but funding/arms sources for Ukraine shift to be more European.

Trump tax cuts expire. The margins in congress are a lot tighter this time for the Republican party in the house.

TSLA sales continue decline, stock continues to soar. (only kind of joking on this one)

TSLA robotaxi thing does not ship/work.

NextBigThing™ will eat into the attention market share of LLMs. It will be a breakthrough in one of these fields:

a) Quantum Computing b) Energy (storage/generation) c) BioTech

We will see an exciting application of Real Time Linux.

Cease-fire in UA. First negotiations about drawing new borders between UA and RU.

It will be the year of the grift.

Musk has already indicated they want to neuter the regulators and implement a proper regulatory environment for crypto. But obviously in a laissez-faire way. So I would expect to see a lot of rug-pulling, insider trading etc.

Blue Origin's New Glenn achieves successful booster recovery and payload to orbit delivery. Initially this is seen as huge win and they emerge as potential challengers to SpaceX, however manufacturing issues with BE-4 engines and questions about the design choice of New Glenn's massive 7m fairing (when satellites are converging towards smaller, more compact designs) will cause speculation for their product market fit.

I'm bullish on Intel. I think the stateside fabs they are building will eventually be powerhouses.

I'm not sure when, but I've been "long Intel" for a long time.

Despite all the technical advancements, hedge funds are holding cash, or liquid. China is old, Europe has stagnated economy, america is expensive and tough to compete on, Russia is in war, Capitalist fear middle east, Korean peninsula is in chaos, japan is stagnated, Australia lacks technical advancements, low popular for manufacturing. Short term stocks in holding in India and Asia, a bit in Nordic population, and America. Manufacturing in Mexico and changed Argentina.

- Elections will be unexpectedly won by candidate running anti-immigration, Russia-friendly candidates

- 2025 will be the hottest year on record

- BlueSky will reach 100 million users

- There will be at least one government fall in France

Angular will overtake React in terms of version number.

International Debt will crash in 2025.

(Worldbank INTERNATIONAL DEBT REPORT 2024)

- Corporate will realize the AI is amazing for demo but doesn’t work for production. - BTC/Tech crash

If the stock market continues to rise there will be a bubble in defense stocks and a lot of defense IPOs

US enters recession in Q1 2025. There's no "soft landing". The correlation between federal interest rate cuts and recessions perfectly predicts this.

Russia - Ukraine war comes to an end.

Market continues to rally into first quarter then most equities slide and start trading sideways.

Inflation softens as shelter slides.

Recession in second half of the year.

Bitcoin hits $150k at some point next year and then starts lagging with the general market.

US prioritizes LNG development and export.

Google becomes leader in AI.

After a compliant SEC and FTC are installed, Twitter and Truth Social will merge in some weird all stock transaction that allows DJT to recoup 3-4 billion while Elon gets to be listed on the stock exchange again at some absurd valuation.

As a lazy reader, could I ask those posters that use linear models for prediction to just say so, for example use tags as: [Linear prediction based on the last five years for bitcoin value]. Since I can make easily that prediction by myself I am not going to extract much value with your linear prediction. Anyway that prediction reflects what you are interested in or what is interesting for you, or what you consider could be interesting for the rest of us. That is the answer to another question: What do you think is interesting for us.

I will start off with an uncommon one: Gambling addiction in kids is through the roof, sports betting, crypto betting, csgo skin betting. These are being openly advertised and we will start seeing the first major push towards stopping some of them.

Some of the owners of the most uncommon Counterstrike skin gambling sites are making about $50 million a month.

2025 will be the year of AI agents

Microsoft comes to their senses and starts selling Windows Server standard at a flat 500 bucks an instance a year without the need for cals.

Introduction of more consumer hardware that resemble industrial hardware (crazy expensive, crazy features or quality or driven by semi-industrial requirements).

Non-anthropomorphic generic AI models.

Impact of war on prices of all kinds of stuff everywhere will become more evident.

The cost of PC components in the US are going to sky rocket higher than we've ever seen with tariffs coming. I really doubt that US fabs will be able to keep up with demand either.

I just put down $2500 on a new PC because of this.

- nuclear drones

- another big drug breakthrough similar to ozempic

More broadly over the next decade, a technological renaissance, a sociological regression

Ok, I'll bite. Some of these are a little far-fetched:

A nuclear bomb is exploded in combat.

The bitcoin/cryptocurrency bubble finally bursts (But if I'm wrong, I think it'll happen by 2030)

While self-driving cars aren't commonplace, geofenced robotaxis will start to become a lot more common, shifting public attitude towards self-driving cars. Excitement will start to grow around "when does my city get robotaxis?" (I don't think we'll get to the "sleep on a road trip" car until the 2030s, nor do I think we'll get "sleep while driving in a blizzard" until the 2040s.)

The US hits its inflection point with electric cars as the NCAS standardization makes things easier, and Elon Musk gets non-Tesla stations to work by having the government drop incentives for OCPP. (If you ever show up to a charging station and it doesn't work, or is wonky, it's because of OCPP. (Superchargers do not use OCPP.) I should write a blog entry some time.)

- Photovoltaic electricity generation will continue to follow the same exponential curve it has been in for the last ~70 years. This will catch everybody completely by surprise.

- The overwhelming amount of excess solar generation during the day will propel grid storage into getting a lot of investment. Its capacity will still be mostly a rounding error in 2025.

- The overwhelming amount of excess solar generation during the day will propel discussions about carbon capture and credits. Those won't go anywhere in 2025.

- Meanwhile, the climate won't become much worse in 2025 compared to 2024. What is still pretty bad, but there will certainly be useless heated discussions about it.

- LLMs will reach peak disillusionment. It's not clear if large LLM providers will even keep providing them. But at the same time there will appear a few people here and there using them for stuff they are good at. Those people won't get much attention.

- Linux won't reach 2% of the PCs. But it will get close.

- The US won't jump into a recession as soon as Trump becomes the president. Not much will change in 2025 alone.

- The EU economy will be a bit better than 2024.

- The China economy will be a bit worse than 2024. But there will be no way to verify this.

- Here in South America most countries will be a bit better than 2024. But Brazil will be worse.

Let's see... what other subjects I can ask my crystal ball about?

Should we start a (play money) prediction market for HN?

It's weird that despite the AI improvements and actual benefits to developers, the current workflow like copilot is still implemented as a hit or miss. It should be the time already for the more limited but more precise AI workflow for developers in 2025.

Global population will reduce by 20+% due to H5N1 pandemic.

Many survivors will go Vegan.

Climate change will continue accelerating.

I'd say there must be an [Ask HN: Predictions for 2026] at the end of 2025.

edit: wrong math.

Trump and cronies will absolutely wreck market stability. There will be actual shortages of basic products. But they will not be acknowledged as mistakes since the companies will be able to price gouge and maintain profits.

There will be at more attempts at more CEO and billionaire murders. They will use propaganda and media manipulation to muddle the grassroots approval of similar action, and change the narrative around Luigi.

Everything will get more expensive. More layoffs. Most people will have to work much harder for much less, but it'll be okay because number will go up.

It will be the year of open source AI due to it being only slightly harder to scale up which gives Meta the chance to meet or beat OpenAI.

XR improves a bit more but headsets will still be expensive.

Large movies and video games that cost above $200 million to make will flop around 75% or more.

A nuclear bomb will be detonated somewhere other than North Korea.

The proliferation of AI phones and AI robots gives us capable assistants like JARVIS

Autonomous slaughterbots will become reality

Israel attacks Iran

End of Ukraine war

Google becomes the AI leader

Battery price drops 30%

Western car market fall into deep crisis, a big player fails

Von der Leyen is replaced

X starts providing financial services

Musk's spending cut plan is a disaster

Get ready for your AI Smart Toaster.. On a serious note 2025 will be year of AI and Tools. Prepared to have AI on every damn thing that you visit digitally.

Another step towards autonomous driving. Short content becoming more popular.

1. ChatBot technology will be instrumental to the rise of oligarchical societies and fascism. Mass propaganda, media corporations colluding with governments, governments operating within companies, etc.

2. Wealth inequality will increase at an exponentially faster rate.

3. Global warming will trend towards warmer than ever before

4. Political violence will escalate especially toward vulnerable populations.

5. Increase in minor and major ecological disasters.

6. Geopolitical issues will create more tensions leading to an amplification of what will be known as WWIII.

7. A key biomedical advancement will come from China.

8. We will look back on this year as the year that started inhumane physical/psychological experiments similar to Tuskegee using technology and vulnerable populations. The devastation of which will eventually be looked at as the creators of the atomic bomb.

9. Grass roots companies with physical and social/community based products and services will start to thrive.

10. A bubble in the AI investment world will pop for the bag-holders, but the heavy weights will remain strong and increase in momentum. A slight return to 2022 expectations for digital goods will reprise (see 2026 predictions for this)

11. The first court case involving AI generated video will begin.

Society will continue regressing towards the mean of the last few thousand years. Less American exceptionalism, more serfdom and misery. Maybe polio will make a come back!

This would be an interesting thread if you asked users to support their predictions with evidence or substance.

I'm going to get older and gain weight.

-Late 2025 some TSMC 2 nanometer chips, maybe for Apple. Intel, Samsung, and perhaps Rapidus will have 20% yields.

-Solid state battery doesn't yet appear in phones.

-MicroLED in some high-end glasses. At least one company outside China, probably Samsung, will demonstrate a tri-fold OLED screen.

-Phase 2 experiments for a successor to Ozempic.

-Cobenfy will increase in voluntary popularity because it's on the muscarinic receptor.

-Trump will fail to regulate grocery monopolies so the use of PiGrow will increase https://github.com/Pragmatismo/Pigrow

-Tesla's collaborative robot is delayed while the Chinese competitor is released.

We move to the post truth economy.

Info and culture war stuff remains an attackers arena. The market place of ideas continues to become less efficient for the average Joe.

Wikipedia starts to collapse. We move from artisanal content moderation to industrial content moderation.

People who can afford it, pay for accuracy and verified information.

Centralization of trust sources begins again.

People who can’t afford it follow tribal leaders.

Polarization passes singularity levels.

AI performs worse than expected, but continues to be made more tractable.

This results in public push back against AI, because no one in the labor force wants the neo liberal era to return.

The DSA data reports on Social Media create at least 1 furore by q1.

Markets wait with bated breath for the signs of contraction, and any contraction results in contagion effects.

No one expects the trump tariffs.

Trump becomes envious of the attention Musk is getting him and fires him, probably in Q1.

Venture Capital as an asset class completely collapses and we seek grassroots alternatives to funding innovation, without the compromise to capital.

actually blogged mine just yesterday https://www.frytg.digital/blog/2024-12-22-my-2025-prediction...

The first episode of Kanojo Okarishimasu season 4 will aired sometime around the first week of July.

I think the defining story of 2025 will be AI agents getting very good with computer use, largely enabled by RL fine tuning.

The US population will continue to get worse at exhibiting attentional control, and will continue to spread and hold novel delusional beliefs at increasing rates.

Bird flu pandemic.

Sora and similar video generating models will mark the beginning of YouTube like era.

* We will find some ancient manuscript that only MRI and AI can read which conveniently realigns or adjusts the foundational beliefs of all abrahamic religions to the alien-god mythology

* Some sort of new power source will be teased which supercedes what we could gain from fusion

* JFK files are released and there is a lot of UFO information inside it

* The false alien disclosure op continues with lots of 'orbs' and drones and whatnot and a threat narrative emerging necessitating loss of liberty

* Russia and Ukraine mutually give up territory - Russia then turns on patriots and nationalists inside their border and NATO arms and fortifies Ukraine to the teeth for a push in the coming decade

* Some very unpleasant things are publicly released by the feds about SV40 and the vaccines

* Elon begins a fatwa against his business rivals and pushes for more technocratic solutions in the government like blockchains

* Very few immigrants are sent back, they just don't report on it and hope nobody notices

* Escalating rhetoric against Mexico and their cartels

Random probabilities, some I think are certain, others just for fun.

- US abandonment of Ukraine spurs EU to make major change in military posture, spending (leaders will be Poland, France)

- Wide spread unrest in Europe, focused on cultural integration of immigrants from abroad/aforementioned military spending

- China tests US response to Taiwan under Trump with significant but limited escalation

- Israel expands operations in Syria and Lebanon

- Bitcoin to $50k

- Open Source LLM takes lead in ARC benchmark

- Sporadic civil unrest in US, focused on corporations. 2 more CEOs killed. Domestic terrorism significantly galvanized.

- CAD/USD continues to fall, Canadian dollar to US$0.65

- Trump makes some sort of insane offer to integrate Canada to Pierre Poilievre

A solar storm wipes out 20% of the US grid.

The decline continues but steeper.

Market instability

2025 will be a year of chaos, uncertainty, and a lot of unhappiness across the world.

The US election gives Donald Trump a second act, with limited but real support of both houses and a lock on the Supreme Court.

He in turn has nominated quite the cast of characters.

Meanwhile governments around the world are teetering or falling. A global trade war is likely. Shooting wars like Ukraine and Israel? Who knows.

Mass shooting events are probably going to go up. Prices certainly will.

The release of hundreds of thousands of social media and “FAANG” developers back into regular society without their massive pay checks will continue to have positive effects on tech. The rest of the world will be able to afford to hire developers again :-)

AI will continue to be a vaudeville act, bright lights and pretty girls and loud noises won’t distract from the fact that generative AI is ultimately a dead end.

The new administration will do something incredibly dumb with cryptocurrency. Multiple cabinet members will be indicted before 2026 is here.

Finally, Trump will have influenced enough leaders to allow him to change his middle name from John to Johne, he will use this technicality to run for a third term as “New Trump”, will win and enshrine the middle name loophole into history.

New LLama will be released.

Efforts of the team will be appreciated publicly.

It will remain the most impactful open model.

Tweaking models will slightly slow down and accelerate development of new hardware optimized for it. New storage, new transistors, new instruction sets, new optical AI chips. This thing for example is both fast and crude https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/ch...

GTA 6 will be released

A hierarchy of LLMs, but they communicate via shared latent space instead of tokens. This will allow for really tiny models on the edge that work best at clarifying intent (and not much else; they have no world knowledge), but seamless and rapid offloading to the cloud with all context still preserved when the intent is thoroughly understood.

A significant portion of the US population will lose nearly everything. Their investments will collapse, their benefits will be stripped away, and they will fall victim to countless scams, or be outright robbed. Much of this will happen through official channels, as restrictions and oversight on corporations and government organizations are reduced or eliminated entirely.

AI will wipe out 80% of jobs. People will starve for employment. Unemployment rates will be highest in History, even more than war times. There will be a general purposelessness among youngsters because of this. And it will create a lot of social issues and unrest in the world

- Valve releases a Steam client for ARM64 and makes native ports of all their games, other companies follow and ARM becomes a much more viable platform for both Windows and Linux

- People will continue to push back against genAI, every company will still be split on whether to use it in marketing, customer support, etc (no change)

- Trump administration slashes a lot of regulations that affect manufacturing as he tries to make the US less dependent on imports, it doesn't make a huge difference though

- Trump to meet Putin in person

- AI hype cycle reaches a peak, bubble bursts soon after

- Linux market share 6% by end of year

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- Russian economy flounders, ruble ends the year considerably lower against western currencies than it is now

- Crypto actually ends the year higher, because Russian and Chinese oligarchs use it to try to get their money out of their home countries

- inflation pressures prevent US interest rates from going more than half a point lower; may even start raising again

- AI hype bubble will continue, but OpenAI will still not have a positive cash flow by end of year, and neither will other major AI startups

There will be 1TW of deployed solar. New nuclear will continue to be vaporware.

* AI and LLMs will continue to improve. AI will create a new programming language that will take the world by storm

* Market share for solar continues to increase

* A market crash occurs in the US and a government bailout is instituted.

* The US creates a pretext to go to war with Iran and is defeated.

I just read last year's predictions and won't read them this year.

AI needs for efficiency will push computing outside of silicon.

More analog computing metaphors everywhere.

UX / UI might evaporate significantly

* HN will stop hating and start loving crypto. Particularly smart contracts, stablecoins.

Only two market related predictions:

- Musk will leave the Trump team before the end of the year, this will cause Tesla to crash, and that will cause the whole market to crash. It should time well with the delayed crash after interest rate stabilization that has repeated multiple times in the past.

- Gamestop MOASS will not happen in 2025.

Given the hype in AI and crypto, I unfortunately predict that there will be widespread layoffs in 2025.

Usually I had a habit of getting my predictions on point, now I hope this prediction is wrong since we all know most predictions in this thread will be wrong; just like last year.

AI will be used to ferret out novel enshittification opportunities

Inflation will begin to rise again

The Federal Reserve will eventually be forced to raise rates again

The market will have a severe correction

Trump will blame everything on the Federal Reserve and will move to limit its power to control monetary policy or disassemble it all together.

Mankind might finally stop using the word THE before her name: Earth

[deleted]

AI used to develop new science along with efforts by governments to control access.

Trump delivers a live speech acknowledging the existence of non human technology on earth and a bit of what we know.

An interesting prediction is one that is predictive of something impactful and correctly predicts something which is currently significantly under weighted by others.

Given this I'll say that 2025 is going to be a significant year geopolitically and economically for Western Europe. Social unrest is rising here, especially around the topic of immigration, and countries like France and the UK are currently on a path to fiscal crisis if we cannot get spending under control.

My prediction is that in 2025 Trump brings to implement more tariffs on China and these tariffs are met with relation by China. Europe tries to remain somewhat neutral, but under threat of tariffs themselves ultimately sides with the US against China resulting in retaliatory tariffs from China on Europe.

Inflation starts rising globally again, resulting in increased borrowing costs which triggers an economic crisis in Europe given recessionary growth and debt servicing costs spiking, ultimately forcing governments to make significant cuts in spending.

The social unrest this results in ultimately further amplifies the populist far-right in Europe, and for this reason 2025 will be looked back at as the year which triggered a meaningful change in the post-war political consensus.

I might be wrong. As someone living in Europe right now though I am worried. Things seem to be really breaking down on multiple fronts and it's not clear to me how things could just go back to normality at this point. Given where we are right now – especially now with the election of Trump – 2025 seems like the year something might finally give.

Israel will keep committing war crimes against Palestinians.

We get a GPT Phone (an AI phone) that's UX is all built around your phone becoming your personal AI assistant.

When you pick up the phone you basically see your personal AI assistant like they are always on Facetime waiting at your beckon call. You could skin your AI personal assistant to be a celebrity or a deceased friend or relative who is always there to guide you through your day. It has vision AI and can see when your happy or sad and respond to how you look if you have that setting on. It does everything for you via text, voice or hand gestures.

The iPhone and Android seem stale (released in 2007 & 2008) and boring in 2024 after using chatGPT as my personal knowledge chatBot for awhile.

* Guatemala starts a major war over Mexican espionage in Petén

* Donald Trump is revealed to be the true identity of Satoshi Nakamoto

* President Nelson (prophet of the LDS church) dies and is replaced by Dallin Oaks

* Dugin writes a sequel to The Fourth Political Theory, titled The n+1'th Political Theory

* New microscope finds the words "God was here" etched into every molecule in the universe

* People become at least 5% cuter as estrogen/testosterone ratio continues to tip in that direction

Layoffs get peaked.

Starship: first attempt at the Moon, I'd guess 80%. No Mars windows.

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AI: wildly unpredictable at every stage and in every regard. Cheaper, better, faster, more drama, that's all easy to predict, but how much of each and which specific benchmarks/legal issues are not.

Only AI capability predictions I will make are:

• Probably still no Tesla level 5 FSD, but Waymo will continue rolling out slowly and cautiously.

• Androids will still be split into cheap toys and expensive industrial equipment, not fully general domestic servants

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Power:

• Wind power increases 7-21%

• PV increases 20-26%

• Fusion has some press releases, doesn't demonstrate much useful

• Battery production increases by about 33% while getting about 14% cheaper per unit

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BigTech companies:

• At least one FAANG gets split up properly, possibly multiple. They've been annoying too many governments for too long.

• X gets more drama, but details are unpredictable. Could equally be "bankrupt", "mandatory for US federal government", "banned in EU, UK, Australia", "sold to Trump personally".

--

Consumer tech:

• Computers get about 31% more power efficient

• 50%: Some specific Smart Dust product revealed to public, people announce expensive paint contianing x motes of smart dust per litre.

• VR/AR: 25% dropped from news cycle like 3D TV, 50% continues like games consoles, 25% something that currently seems sci-fi

--

Geopolitics:

• Musk finds $2T to cut (66%), Congress pretends to take it seriously (80%), but nobody wants the cuts in their district (99.9%) so it stalls unless and until Musk can find a way to effectively buy out the downsides (80% chance Musk finds a way at all, but only 25% chance the method he finds is actually legal).

• US weapons stop being sent to Ukraine: (completely banned even for sale: 5%; they can be sold but no more are given "for free": 60-70%; repeat of previous Trump request for dirt on domestic opponents in exchange for aid: 30-40%)

• EU aid stops going to Ukraine: 1% while they remain independent, 99% if they get conquered.

• Ukraine develops nuclear deterrent: 30-50% if aid stops or is threatened, otherwise 5-10%

• Putin dies: assassinated, ~2%; all other causes, ~4%

• Trump dies: assassinated, 1-2.25%; all other causes, 5-6%

Musk and Trump will have an epic falling out that will result in the greatest Meme war of all time.

Project 2025 gets implemented to its fullest extent .... all 922 pages of it. Every crashes soon after.

- Value of Bitcoin increases at least as much as in 2023

- Disney will make huge reductions in plans for Star Wars and Marvel projects that are not started

- GPT 5 will be a significant improvement, but not as much as expected.

- Trump increases toll barriers, but lowers them after he discovers that US also depends on good trading relations (he will spin this as a win)

- Trump spreads FUD about his commitment to NATO, that causes EU to invest more in their already significant weapons industry. US manufacturers are afraid to lose customers, and pressures Trump to change his approach (he will of course spin this as a win)

- Israel bombs the new leaders of Syria in January and escalates the conflict significantly.

Nothing Much. Which is surprisingly the same as 2024. Apart from a possible recession.

In some way I feel things have stagnated. Apart from rapid progress on AI. We will continue to see development and progress on hardware. N2 finally from TSMC but not on Apple SoC yet. Blackwell GPU, continue price improvement in GPU competition due to Intel ARC. Etc Most of these are obvious and continue from current trend.

I used to post these trend and roadmap on HN. Now they no longer seems important or matter. iOS and Android have somewhat converged into very similar for the past 3-4 years, that I wasn't expected.

May be Trump winning election along with the pendulum swing back in such massive way wasn't expected as well.

May be this is a sign of depression but In some sense I feel everything is very boring. My most unpresent feeling is that A lot of things outside tech have declined in quality. And we are not improving on it.

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Edit: May be I will use this space to rant about things.

Video Codec - No x266. No VVC Encoder. No Progress on AV2. Stagnated H.267 research. The most popular codec is still AVC finalised in 2003, and AVC High Profile in 2005. So we are 20 years already and still using it.

AAC-LC is finally patent free. But the world no longer cares about Audio Codec. AAC-LC was the first version of AAC that came just after MP3 and we are on 27 years already.

JPEG-XL Not getting anywhere. Despite clearly being the better option for BBP 1.0+. JPEG is still most widely use, and JPEG was finalised in 1992 so we are 32 years in already.

Apple milking on hardware. iOS isn't getting any better. Although latest version of macOS finally have some useful addition.

Internet getting smaller. We can no longer search for things we once saw with Google. Google hasn't been great at most things since their IPO. But it does seems that people are getting excited with their latest AI development.

Amazon milking its AWS. No significant competition from HyperScaler. And no middle ground with Dedicated Sever and Cloud Offering.

Minimal Hardware progress on NAND and HDD. Especially in terms of Cost / GB. HAMR is late by at least 5 - 7 years depending on how you count it.

Retail are now going to Tech without understand anything about it. From QR Code Menu to ordering system inside restaurant with minimal Mobile Network reception. Adding WiFi but with old equipment, capacity constrain before loading anything is very very bad UX.

MNOs moving much slower into 5G telecom equipment upgrading. Basically milking 5G and 4G customer for as long as possible. Instead of trying to make its services better.

USB-C is still a pile of mess.

No Consumer NAS backup function with S3 Glacier Deep Archive.

Streaming is a pile of mess. Netflix gone down hill. Selection of Movies have completely disappeared. I have no idea how Youtube Music is still...... oh well after all it is google I guess I shouldn't expect anything.

Everything is subscription. No BluRay successor in the pipeline. Software continue to be bloated.

Mobile Gaming is just a repeat of the same thing. Literally the same engine with different IPs. And loot box gambling. I have finally deleted all games on my iPhone.

Even Desktop Gaming aren't better. There are finally enough people complaining about Unreal Engine, while simplify game development ultimately make most games looked the same. Along with low frame rate. One could argue this is development studio problem and nothing to do with Unreal, I think there are finally some voices concern about how EPIC encourages it.

Modern AAA Games are also so concerned about Graphics and other crap but completely forgotten about Game Play and Storyline.

On Gaming. I am waiting for Switch 2. But then it is not only delayed. But in terms of hardware released and used in Nintendo Console, Switch 2 will likely be the worst of all in its history using tech that will be 5-7 years old by the time it releases. I know it is not all about hardware but it could have been a generation better and we wouldn't repeat what happen with Zelda lag in some scenes.

Outside Tech, Shrinkflation is happening everything in the food and drinks industry. They are finally reaching another 10 - 15 years cycle where they are looking to cut corners. Both in ingredients and size.

Food quality across the board is decreasing. Mostly because of inflation.

Cheap Chinese Electric cars are everywhere. May be people like them. But they are of very low quality. A little sad German didn't react. But again this is to be expected. And why everything is boring.

Wireless Earphone industry is happy with their margin. May be I am the only person who want battery swap on these thing instead of thinking them as disposable gadget every 2 years. I was hoping someone outside Apple would do it since I first bought AirPod Gen 1. But no. nearly 10 years later we are still throwing them away.

Housing is still expensive. We still dont have ways to built high rise high quality neatly furnished building with substantially less time.

So much about Apple Pay replacing the wallet and we just passed 10 years anniversary. NFC hasn't improved.

I guess after typing a lot of these out I realised and can summarised it as, everyone is busy milking their product and services they all forgot about the content. That is what annoys me the most. Things aren't getting better.

Musk will say the full self driving is coming by the end of the year. This time for real.

TikTok ban becomes a nothingburger.

- Large release from Boston Dynamics

- Meta releases serious enterprise self-hosting Llama platform

- Apple Intelligence remains useless

- Trump begins to show serious signs of mental decline. Not tired like Biden, but overly paranoid and delusional like Putin.

- GPT-5 is almost the same as GPT-4, but it doesn't have a recognizable tone

Let me begin by saying that this is a throwaway account and I'll be logging out without saving the password right after I finish this post, so if you want to ask questions or debate anything I say, you'll be waiting a very long time for a reply from me. This is for my benefit, as my doctor has suggested that I spend less time arguing with people on the Internet who are obviously wrong.

Also, it may be instructive to go through previous years' prediction threads and see how many of those predictions were accurate. You'll probably be able to count them without taking off your shoes.

All that said, here are my predictions:

* At least one of the top-tier companies doing GenAI research (e.g. MS, Google, or OpenAI) will cut their losses and shut down said program. If it's OpenAI, that's probably also the end of the company. Nvidia's market cap will come back down to earth.

* The mainstream Democratic party will, yet again, decide that they lost the 2024 Presidential election due to insufficiently catering to conservatives, and will once again decide on a strategy of "triangulation" in the years to come. This will continue to lose them elections.

* Statements and/or behavior of more elected Federal officials (meaning the president or a member of either house of Congress) will make it obvious to the general public that said officials are suffering from major cognitive decline, presumably from advancing dementia due to old age.

* More corporate executives in unpopular industries such as defense, banking, fossil fuels, or health insurance again, will be assassinated now that the idea is in people's heads. The only thing that surprised me about the Brian Thompson case is that it took this long. At least a significant minority of said assassins will walk due to jury nullification or eyewitnesses refusing to testify.

* 2025 will be the hottest year on record, until 2026 tops it.

* Cooperation between Musk and Trump won't last due to no room in the world being large enough to fit both those egos. Trump will find himself sidelined in his own administration and left to sulk and watch TV.

-USA stops supporting Ukraine war efforts and Ukraine is forced to cede large portions of land to Russia, creating a DMZ along vast stretches of the new border.

-Expanded land use restrictions and federal tariffs against solar and wind, resulting from pressure from fossil fuel lobbyists and the new head of the department of energy.

-Another CEO is shot.

-Crypto has a major correction; bitcoin finishes the year well under $100k.

-US grocery prices are higher than ever.

-Pierre Poilievre is the new Prime Minister of Canada and holds a majority.

-EVs continue to grow market share at a linear rate in North America.

Stocks keep going up

Trump inaugurated without any incident

2 more mass shootings

Advances in LLM and other Ai

US economy keeps growing and outperforming rest of world.

We progressively advance towards Cyberpunk:

- governments around the world proceed with bowing to megacorps/cults/mobs;

- entire jobs disappear to AI [1], people are told that they "just need to" learn a new job, at the age of 50+;

- money is further diverted from fundamental research and towards AI, because governments and private institutions are convinced that AI will magically solve the world's problems;

- AGI remains 6 months away;

- nuclear fusion remains 3 years away;

- as Pax Americana disappears, the UN remains paralyzed and the EU remains in crisis, international relations return to wolf-at-the-door style anarchy [2] and generalized economic+proxy wars;

- new crypto boom (possibly followed immediately by large correction);

- with further deregulation and wars, we proceed to destroy the Earth and ignore the consequences, predicting that AI will somehow solve it;

- as a consequence of both international anarchy and environmental collapse, record number of refugees;

- as a consequence of major despair, ecoterrorism, ploutoterrorism (is there a better way for a CEO getting shot?), fascioterrorism start becoming fashionable;

- eventually, a truce/occupation in Gaza;

- no war in Taiwan just yet;

- some Line-of-Control-style truce in Ukraine [3];

- more escapism, with the budget for super-hero movies, video-games, etc. increasing;

- lots of AI crap, with GenAI-written books saturating Amazon, GenAI-written content saturating social networks, GenAI-written content replacing journalists in at least one major news source, a few semi-experimental GenAI-written movies and/or videogames;

- generally speaking, people understand less and less the world around them, because their news sources more and more filled with disinformation and random crap;

- companies still believe that AI will magically solve all their problems;

- Netflix starts generating series with GenAI (although the release might not be in 2025);

- companies that sell hardware and services to company that try to adopt AI make lots of money;

- we do not hit planetary limits for AI yet, but we inch closer;

- rich countries (perhaps with the exception of China) further decrease their investment in education;

- the signs show that the economy is just fine, so no need to change anything.

[1] Despite AI not necessarily being able to do their job.

[2] That kind of anarchy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchy_(international_relatio... .

[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_of_Control

#1 Something has to happen of the drones that are over various US military sites. People seem to want to bury their head in the sand, not acknowledging China owns substantial "farmland" in the US, especially near military sites, that could in theory be home to any number of drone bases. If China is preparing for war, it could risk a global catastrophe.

#2 The Russia-Ukraine war is likely to come to a peaceful end. Putin seems to have mostly lost his appetite for war, and we know that Trump will not want to fund Ukraine any more. Ukraine will have to accept the loss of some conquered territory.

#3 With regard to non-CoT LLMs, gpt-4o becomes worse on all relevant benchmarks compared to the leading open source models. Currently, as I understand, it still wins on some benchmarks.

#4 Tiktok, if not all social media, gets banned for those under 18 on the grounds of foreign influence, although ID requirements get struck down, and kids can misrepresent their age.

[dead]

God, this thread is bleak. Not undeservedly, but...woof.

Nobody's mentioned antibiotic resistant bacteria much that I saw, so that'll probably keep being more and more of an issue.

Everyone predicted a second Great Depression during Covid that lined up with 1929... Well, Trump and his friends might drive us toward that in 2029, or earlier.

AI peaks and we can't eke out much more real benefit from it, but there's too much investment in it for businesses to admit it, so the grifters spin into high gear.

Elon Musk and the other billionaires continues to get richer.

The poor continue to get poorer.

Trump pulls the US out of every socially-good but vaguely anti-business agreement.

Russia finally pulls out of Ukraine but keeps the bits it "liberated".

China declares itself to be the biggest and most stable global superpower as America and Russia have spun off the deep end.

I have to replace my bike tires.

"Hybrid WW3" continues. Russia advances most everywhere in the proxy politics space (perhaps paradoxically except Syria.)

Western economies continue on their troll-induced march to self-implosion. The defamation attacks on their Comparative Advantage industries intensify, particularly:

- Non-Musk Big Tech / AI

- Non-Musk aerospace (=> Boeing)

- Wall Street / non-crypto finance

- Non-Musk automotive

- Hollywood

Immigration is halted or reversed in most Western countries, halving long-term GDP growth.

Hard to say whether the H5N1 flu will turn into another pandemic.

[dead]

[dead]

* AI will fizzle out.

* We will finally do something about climate change.

* The world will finally become sane again.

Just kidding! Lol

Cold fusion turns out to part of the physics repressed since the 1950s, and progress begins the path to give everyone their own personal megawatt of clean energy.

Disclosure actually happens, and it turns out we're not alone in the Universe.

BitGrid turns out to be the most efficient way to bring Petaflops to the masses, it's then disappeared as "born secret" and you never hear of it again.

Someone figures out an effective algorithm for simulating a quantum computer in real time at any scale, again "Born Secret" and it disappears.

H1N5 (Bird flu?) takes hold in the human population, millions die.

1. AI regulation becomes fragmented and messy as different jurisdictions implement contradictory rules. The EU's AI Act creates a "Brussels effect" but China and the US take divergent approaches, creating headaches for global tech companies.

2. "AI-free" becomes a marketing term like "organic." Premium services start advertising human-only customer service, human-written content, and AI-free creative work. A certification industry emerges around this.

3. Climate tech sees a boom in investment as extreme weather events continue to drive home the urgency. Particular focus on grid-scale energy storage and carbon capture technologies.

4. The "nearshoring" trend accelerates, with Mexico and Eastern Europe becoming major manufacturing hubs as companies seek alternatives to China while staying relatively close to major markets.

5. The first mainstream consumer AR glasses hit the market, but like early smartphones, they're clunky and limited. The real impact is in industrial and professional applications.

6. Remote work stabilizes at a new equilibrium: most tech companies settle into a hybrid model with 2-3 office days per week. Fully remote becomes less common as companies optimize for "collaboration days."

7. The web3/crypto world pivots hard toward "real world assets" and practical financial applications, moving away from speculation. Smart contract platforms become boring but useful infrastructure.

8. A major cybersecurity crisis involving AI models leads to a fundamental rethinking of model deployment and security practices. "Model poisoning" becomes the new ransomware.

9. The shortage of high-end GPUs starts to ease as new fabs come online, but the industry faces a new bottleneck in networking equipment and specialized AI accelerators.

10. Traditional higher education faces a crisis as employers increasingly accept alternative credentials and bootcamps. Several mid-tier universities merge or shut down.

- Claude | when asked for hacker news style prediction. I agree with most predictions.